


Spirited Moonshadow

by beautifulterriblequeen



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Moonshadows gonna Moonshadow, Runaan is also hungry, Snake Monster, all the fighting, beating up my elf boy a bit, bit of gore, cocky young runaan, everybody relax this is the plan, for a given value of death, monster hunter Runaan, moonshadow spirits, nod to Tolkien, sassy Runaan, slish slash, spirit realm, teenage Runaan, temporary major character death, they will also sass, with tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 04:38:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19221757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beautifulterriblequeen/pseuds/beautifulterriblequeen
Summary: Black blades bore deep moonlike crescent edges that gleamed as if kissed by Moonlight. Runaan gave each one a circular flick. “Don’t do this. You were meant for a different path.”But the Earth spirit’s deathly smile, so sweet and gentle beneath its demonic eyes, was its only response.





	Spirited Moonshadow

“Is this as big as your kind get, or is there anyone larger I can defeat?” Runaan drew his short swords from the narrow double sheath nestled against his spine and flicked their straight white blades out to full length. The winds of dawn swirled in the box canyon that stretched before him. Its breezy fingers tugged through his long ponytail as he stared up at the monstrosity he’d chased away from the Moonshadow village. The chieftain had promised him breakfast after battle. If he survived.

The eyeless creature towered over him like a giant cobra, unable to escape the canyon Runaan had trapped it in. An Underhowl—the first he’d ever seen. Its slender, snakelike body sported a delicate armor of chitinous body scales, as well as a fleshy frill just behind its head. The frill’s spines grew into a dozen tentacles, each tipped with razor-sharp mouths that could rip him in two and feed his dying halves to the scimitar-fanged, circular maw that dominated its face.

“You… are… tiny…” The larger mouth spoke slowly and sloppily, for its shape had been determined long before Xadian became a language. A three-pronged, deep purple tongue flicked out, points waving with prehensile grace, tasting Runaan’s scent.

Runaan drew himself up to his full height, achieved last summer— _finally_ —and felt the taut pull of his short bow’s string across his chest. “I have been enthusiastically informed otherwise.”

“And tasty.”

The young journeyman tipped his horns to the side with a sassy grin. “That one I _have_ heard.”

The Underhowl smiled with its mouths. All of them. So _many_. Such dark creatures hunted from underground by panicking their victims into freezing with terror and then yanking them below the surface to feed in silence and safety. Three such deaths in one village over the span of a week had led to Runaan being ordered to dispatch the threat. Standard journeyman assassin work such as this was always engaging, but being assigned to hunt a rare Underhowl added a new layer of interest.

The Underhowl had weaponized sound itself. Its roaring lay below the point of elven hearing, but it felt as loud as an avalanche, and it seemed to shake one’s very soul from the inside out, driving terror into its victims with terrifying hallucinations. While those were very bad things for Moonshadows, they were merely appetizers for the Underhowl’s main course—which had recently _also_ been Moonshadows.

Runaan bounded to the top of a boulder near the box canyon’s entrance. Back straight, hands at his sides, with the wind teasing his side tails, he eyed the slick brown behemoth in the box canyon. It, in turn, focused on him with all but two of its tentacles. Most of them made idle munching motions at him, though he stood well out of range of their jagged teeth.

His turquoise gaze studied the vast creature. Its coiled length was more swift than bulky. Those tentacles were whips of pure muscle, a dozen arms clasping mouthfuls of knives.

Runaan could die so very many ways today. But he’d just turned nineteen. The final stage of his assassin training wouldn’t be complete until he successfully completed several more hunter missions. He couldn’t die yet—not permanently. He had _Plans_.

Some of them even involved being an assassin.

“You can return to the depths below Earthblood territory on your own,” he called to the tentacled brown horror, knowing it would do no such thing. His clear voice carried easily on the swirling winds. He twirled one of his blades for emphasis and snapped it tight in his fist, aiming the sword at the beast. “Or I can kill you. Don’t make me wait for your decision.”

The Underhowl’s immediate response— _How considerate_ —was to jam all of its tentacles against the stony ground—too stony to burrow to safety, for that had been Runaan’s trap—and use the rock as an amplifier for its cry.

Its infrasound howl vibrated underfoot and rose through Runaan’s boots, invading his very bones with the cold ache of terror. His stomach twisted in sudden fear, and his chest seized. His palms grew damp inside his gloves. Every one of his instincts cried out that death was upon him, that there was no escape, that the spirits had come for him.

But Runaan was a Moonshadow assassin. He had tasted death. He had heard the spirits call for his soul. Yet here he stood, still alive and very much kicking. His turquoise eyes slitted, and he bared his teeth in a silent growl. The dawn warmed his shoulders, and its rising winds tugged through his long white hair. He ground the ball of one foot against the boulder and crouched, ready to spring.

Life sang in his veins. Death keened in his bones. They met and mingled in his smile.

_How I live for this._

The young journeyman launched himself off the boulder, white blades out to his sides. Half of the Underhowl’s tentacles rose and sent their unheard shrieks in various directions, trying to track him while he was airborne.

One wicked sound pulse caught Runaan just before his foot touched down on a stepping stone to his target. He flinched against the howling inside his head and missed his footing. Tumbled messily across the boulder and landed hard on the stony ground with a muffled grunt of pain. Coarse sand ground against his cheek and infiltrated his left side tail. “Nngh, Moon and _Shadow_ ,” Runaan cursed, shaking the offending particles free of his hair.

The Underhowl uncoiled and began a serpentine slither toward him, using flexible dark scales on its belly to pull itself across the hard ground. It had found him, and it would keep shrieking until the horrors behind Runaan’s eyelids had their way with him.

Unless Runaan shut it up.

With a determined groan, the Moonshadow shoved himself upright, sheathed his swords onto his back, and braced his feet on the sides of two nearby boulders so that he stood off the ground. It did no good as protection from the insanity shrieks the Underhowl hurled at him, but it did allow him a good vantage point from which to loose arrows.

Runaan slipped the now-scuffed short bow off his shoulder and nocked a poison-tipped arrow from his hip quiver, drawing and firing in the space of one breath. His missile lodged itself through one of the monster’s tentacle mouths, pinning it shut, and the appendage began to flail wildly, trying to dislodge the deadly shaft.

But another was already singing its way through the flesh of a second tentacle. Followed immediately by a third. Other tentacles halted their silent shrieking—blessedly lowering the shaking in Runaan’s bones—and began trying to extract the arrows from their flailing counterparts.

“You haven’t said a word, and you _still_ talk too much.” With a wolflike grin, Runaan leaped forward, firing more arrows as he landed on boulder after boulder, always zigzagging closer to the silently shrieking behemoth, dodging its blind attacks. His arrows pierced more tentacles, enraging the Underhowl further.

The great, shiny body halted. Its toothy gyre opened toward Runaan as he stood on the nearest rock, bow lowered. Vicious teeth that curved like scimitars dribbled with strings of venomous saliva as it stretched its circular jaws wide and, in a voice of deepest fury, _screamed_.

The blast caught Runaan full in the chest and tumbled him off the boulder in a breathless tangle of white hair and bloody visions. Most of the creature’s shriek was still infrasound, but some had been horribly, painfully audible. The Moonshadow skidded on one knee and dug the fingers of his scuffed glove into the coarse sand among the boulders, feeling his whole torso clench hard from the shock of the blow. His ears rang as if warring choirs of Sunfires and Skywings were trying to out-sing each other at a Summer’s Turn festival, and the world had gone foggy. “ _Nngh_.” He closed his eyes as his insides threatened to liquefy and leak out. A painful cough brought the taste of blood across his tongue.

Runaan took a shuddering breath and braced himself with a full-body flex. Then he brought his bow to bear sideways across the top of the rock that lay between him and his target. He aimed up toward the monster’s gaping maw, poison-tipped arrow hungry to bury itself in the deep, dark, slimy flesh of its soft palate. “If you had eyes, you might see this coming,” he muttered. He nocked the arrow, yanked back on the string. He could nearly taste victory, and it was _sweet_.

His bow snapped.

Runaan instinctively dodged its whirring halves as its tension released with a crack. Sweet victory was suddenly far out of reach again, and his anticipation soured. That tumble he’d taken had done more damage than he’d realized, and his choice to irritate the beast with poison arrows suddenly seemed foolhardy in the extreme.

Almost half of the Underhowl’s tentacles were flailing in agony, but between those that remained and its screaming maw, Runaan didn’t stand much of a chance, no matter how skilled he was with his blades. He glared coolly at the creature as it picked an arrow out of a damaged tentacle. The poison wouldn’t be enough to kill it, and soon all those tiny mouths would be back at work.

If Runaan didn’t act fast, he’d be just another dead Moonshadow in a long line of victims. And some other journeyman assassin would get the glory for this kill.

Runaan squinted wryly. _Well, that’s not happening._

He rose and stepped atop the boulder. Let the wind catch his hair. Felt the dawn backlight his horns and outline his silhouette. “You think I’m just another tasty Moonshadow? That I have ‘easy prey’ carved into my horns? That I will lay down and die just because you’re hungry?” Runaan let a cocky laugh bubble from his lips.

Because that was exactly what he intended to do. _What could go wrong? I’ve done this before. More than once. Twice is more than once._

He hopped off the far side, keeping his eyes locked on that great toothy maw, which heaved out breaths that smelled of decaying flesh. With his hands empty out to his sides, he strode—slowly, purposefully—until he stood in easy reach.

Between the space of one breath and the next, all of the monster’s undamaged tentacles converged on Runaan, shard-toothed jaws hissing open with angry anticipation.

His mind thrummed with a thrill of pure fear. He let it go.

The mouths cried out, and their silent shrieks drove Runaan to one knee. His body felt like it was melting. He let that go, too.

The gritty golden stone below him blurred and danced as his eyeballs shook with the sonic assault. Ethereal hands rose from the ground, and for a moment Runaan believed he was hallucinating. Until he felt their presence echo off his soul.

Spirits of the dead. Of the _eaten_. Moonshadow spirits, angry, seeking their own vengeance. And Runaan had let them down.

One of them seized his ankle with chill fingers, while another, more direct in its intent, grasped him by the throat. The third spirit’s hand reached into his skull through his eyes, blinding him with a starry blue dazzle and a flash of icy cold. Runaan’s gasp echoed in his own mouth as his spirit detached and floated free.

His vision faded to black, and then the spirit world blazed white around him.

Runaan’s eyes struggled to comprehend what he saw at first. His vision perceived only slight variations in bright tones. The three spirits knelt around him in palest blue and lavender forms, eyes hard, the edges of their bodies wisping as if made of smoke. His own body gleamed dark with turquoise highlights—his full Moonshadow form. The box canyon stretched before him, formed of stone that gleamed like marble and glass. The sight that met his spirit eyes took him aback as he glanced up toward the spot where the great hulking monstrosity had been.

A tiny, willowy thing stood in the Underhowl’s place, all green and palest sunshine-gold, a soft swirl of nature spirit that would not have been out of place in a child’s bedtime story. Except for its eyes. It had six, large and angular, and they bore black sclera and red irises that throbbed with fiery hatred. It bared its teeth at Runaan, and a massive, guttural growl oozed past its lips.

In that moment, Runaan hesitated. He could see—could _feel_ —that this Earth spirit had not been intended for destruction. The Underhowl was an ancient thing, and it had been created to tend living creatures. Yet it had chosen not to follow the spirit of its purpose, but to embrace a twisted interpretation of its calling.

Deep in his soul, Runaan wanted to call the Earth monster back to its origins. To give it another chance to start over, make amends, set things right. His mouth opened to speak.

The beast before him lunged, moving its rootlike feet as if running in a living wooden skirt. Thick ropy tendrils formed at its shoulders and shot out, trying to tangle Runaan in their grasp. The Moonshadow spirits fled with howls of frustration.

Caught flat-footed by the sudden attack, Runaan barely dodged, rolling to the side in a whirl of loose white hair that floated weightlessly around his head. Turning to face the twisted spirit, he formed a spirit dagger in each hand. Black blades bore deep moonlike crescent edges that gleamed as if kissed by Moonlight. Runaan gave each one a circular flick. “Don’t do this. You were meant for a different path.”

But the Earth spirit’s deathly smile, so sweet and gentle beneath its demonic eyes, was its only response. That, and a soft, backward slither on agile, rooty feet.

Instinct prickled in the back of Runaan’s mind, and he lunged, slashing hard. His sudden thrust drove the malevolent spirit from its close proximity to his slumped body, which lay pale and wisp-edged on the ground as if in deep sleep. If the spirit could harm his physical form enough, Runaan’s spirit wouldn’t be able to return to it. But the tree spirit was even more flexible than he was, and it darted around him, whipping like a willow and blurring with speed. Appearing behind him, it snaked a tendril of root out and captured his body’s right wrist.

Runaan spun and dropped hard, slicing the root off with the flash of a spirit dagger. But even as he did so, he felt a cold pang in his right wrist, as if that part of him were going numb. He spun to stand between the twisted creature and his own body. “This won’t end well for you,” he growled.

But the Underhowl was not cowed. “You cannot defend yourself and attack me at the same time, little Moonshadow.” Its voice was surprisingly airy for its tree-like appearance and blood-red eyes. “You must choose. If you stay out of your body long enough to defeat me, your physical form will perish from lack of your spirit. Or you may accept your failure now, return to your soft and blood-filled form… and join the spirit world permanently when I kill you. I shall not make you wait long.” A tiny green stem of a tongue licked across the spirit’s lips, twisting its sweet expression into one of foulness. “I smell pride on you, Moonshadow. Anger too, and pain. Your despairs will fill me well.”

Shoving hard memories down before they could distract him, Runaan bared his teeth and ground the ball of his foot into the bright white sand. It gave strangely, though, offering no traction. In the split-second that his focus was distracted, the Underhowl struck again.

It bypassed Runaan’s spirit, bending in an entirely inhuman manner, and slashed at his body, catching him across the back of one shoulder with a whipping root. A thick line of cold began to burn across Runaan’s back, and he grunted in sudden pain. But he shifted and stood over his own body, gesturing with his glimmering blade. “I thought you’d hit harder. Perhaps I overestimated you.”

The monster struck again, and Runaan slashed at it. He pushed himself hard, adapting to the creature’s ethereal flexibility and finding that, here in the spirit world, he possessed it as well. He danced and twirled, slashing and cutting, carving his victory into the Underhowl’s spirit one cut at a time. But the tree spirit just grew more tendrils. Time kept passing, and his body drew closer to permanent death. He was going to lose the battle just as the Underhowl had predicted.

Runaan spun hard and fast as the creature slid around to his left. He could feel the warm burn of his own death creeping along his shoulders. His dagger slashed across two of the spirit’s eyes, and the thing screamed in agony. He jinked, aiming for the heart with his other dagger, but the sweet-faced beast flung its rooty arms wide in spectral rage, and a hard-tipped finger pierced Runaan’s chest just below his collarbone, running him through with a heat-stealing slither that drew a gasp of agony from Runaan’s lips.

The Underhowl felt the contact and lunged toward Runaan, growling in pain and fury, eager to finish him off. Runaan felt his balance slip as his chest started to radiate with cold from the spirit’s touch.

_Out of time._

His only hope of victory—of survival—was retreat. Arching hard, Runaan kicked backward and landed in his corporeal self with a messy, hypnic jerk that sprawled his limbs.

His chest burned as he gasped hard for the sweet coolness of air. His turquoise eyes opened again, wide and straining as he drank in the endless bright colors of the physical world.

They were _beautiful_.

He lay in the shade of the Underhowl’s towering, smooth-armored body. Its remaining tentacle mouths surrounded him, just beginning to open. So many infrasound blasts at this minimal distance would fling Runaan straight back into the spirit world without hope of returning to his body.

With a single, fluid motion, he tucked into a backward roll and pushed himself airborne. In midair, he drew his white bladed swords from his back. A hard flick snapped them to their full length, and he slashed his way through the two nearest tentacles, leaving their ends flopping on the coarse sand and gushing a dark ichor.

Without pausing, Runaan leaped and stabbed one sword into what remained of a tentacle he’d slashed, just as the monster yanked it back in pain. The creature’s instinctive retreat pulled the Moonshadow high into the air and momentarily out of reach of the other tentacles. The Underhowl reacted quickly and tried to bite him with its vast, circular jaw of scimitar fangs. Runaan freed his blade and arched high over the beast’s head, delivering a spinning slice to two more tentacles as they tried to snatch him out of the air.

He landed on the monster’s armored back with a smooth skid, blades out, hair flying, teeth bared. Immediately the remaining tentacles descended on him, reaching behind the blind monster’s head from their places on its neck frill, their silent shrieks blasting from several directions. His bones shook hard, and a terrifying void of moonless, empty night flickered before his vision.

He grimaced and hurled himself into another spin. Lopped off one tentacle as it struck. Then a second. Leaped high off the Underhowl’s frill and slashed hard at a third near its base, cutting off its infrasound scream. He rebounded off the flailing appendage and twisted in midair, slashing as he spun, slicing one more tentacle off at a sharp angle, sending its gnashing mouth spinning.

His trajectory took him high above the monster’s head, toward one of the two remaining tentacles. With a hard twist, he pivoted around and stabbed one white sword deep into the fleshy wall of the tentacle, anchoring himself. His other arm stretched wide, and as the other tentacle dived for him, bony teeth desperate to spill his blood, he sliced half its head off. The spurting chunk of meat tumbled to the rough sand below, taking its silent voice with it.

The Underhowl’s circular mouth roared in frustrated agony a dozen paces below his boots. Before Runaan could leap to safety, the appendage he’d stabbed his sword into coiled tightly around him, pinning his arms to his sides. He writhed and bucked against its grip, but it was nearly as thick as his waist and made of pure muscle. Only one of his swords was in a useful position, but if he cut through the tentacle’s musculature—he glanced down as it swung him high, saw his fate looming, and gritted his teeth—he’d fall straight into the creature’s maw.

_Might as well._

“I’ve been called salty far more often than tasty.” Runaan wrenched hard against his sword, forcing it through the sinewy tentacle. “I welcome your feedback on the matter.” The last bit of gristly muscle gave way, and Runaan felt his balance tip and plummet. As the appendage separated, he kicked free of it and arched into his fall, reducing his white blades to their shorter length and pulling them in across his chest.

He landed inside the Underhowl’s circular maw with blades spinning and white hair flying. The creature’s talon-hooked fangs spiraled shut behind him, trapping him in fetid darkness that smelled of rot and death. A cold gust of rotting breath saturated his hair and invaded his lungs, and the Underhowl’s whiplike tongue shoved him against those deadly teeth. The fang points drove into his back, and Runaan growled hard against the burning pain of their venom.

His blades lit with Moonlight in the blackness, and he hacked at the tongue and sliced off one of its three forked points, then pulled himself free of the curving fangs and leaped toward the back of the creature’s cavernous mouth. The swords threw violent shadows around the piercing glow that lit his bared teeth and shafted through his trailing ponytail. He thrust upward as he landed, and one blade sheathed itself high in the Underhowl’s soft palate. The light in the fleshy cavern dimmed by half. A swift spinning kick to the sword’s hilt activated its full length and shoved the steel shaft into the monster’s brain.

The shriek the creature let loose was mercifully short before it shuddered into death. Runaan dropped his other sword and clapped his hands over his ears as the Underhowl’s death cry blasted past him. As the beast began to topple, its neck and head plummeting toward the ground, Runaan snatched up his sword and stabbed it deep into the creature’s mouth to anchor himself. The collision with the ground was less violent than he expected. Dead monsters didn’t bounce.

Runaan tried to take a deep breath and settle his shaking guts, but the air in the creature’s mouth stank, and he only ended up coughing. The impact of its fall spiraled its jaws open a little, though, and fresh air and the clean light of dawn entered, caressing Runaan’s bloodied back as he knelt in the mouth of his vanquished enemy.

A high, thin keening reached his ringing ears. Runaan shot a wary look upward as the Underhowl’s treelike spirit wafted down through the wall of its dead mouth and hovered in the swordlight. Its slender tentacle arms were wrapped around its head in distress, its mouth open as if in pain.

Runaan stood and balanced one foot against the curve of a massive fang. “I told you. You were meant for a different path. You refused to choose it. So I have chosen for you.”

“What… right… have you…” The spirit’s thin voice rippled with rage.

No. not rage. _Fear_.

Runaan straightened his shoulders, though they throbbed with various hurts that were becoming harder to ignore. “I am Moonshadow. I have the _only_ right. Now, go.”

The spirit trembled and hunched. “I do not know the way!”

“We will take it with us.” The soft voice glided past Runaan’s ear with a cool brush of wind, and a shiver rippled down Runaan’s spine. One of the Moonshadow spirits approached the tree spirit and was soon joined by the other two. They surrounded their murderer, then looked back at Runaan. Much passed between them—regrets, gratitude. Sorrow, release. Peace.

Runaan nodded soberly. “Then I will see you on the other side.”

The shortest spirit spoke up, its voice aged. “We will look for you. But not soon.”

Runaan’s mouth fell open softly at the spirit’s words, its gentle regard of him, its otherworldly prescience. But he only nodded. They were all Moonshadow. No further words were necessary.

The three Moonshadow spirits linked hands and ushered the trembling tree spirit ahead of them, wisping into nothingness before Runaan’s eyes. A small sigh escaped his lips, and he allowed himself to feel. Relief, closure. Life.

And then, rather a lot of _pain_.

With gritted teeth and a few too many curses, Runaan retrieved his swords, doused their moonlight spell, and leaped gingerly through the circle of curving fangs that ringed the Underhowl’s mouth. Though its ring-shaped jaws were slack in death, he had no wish to get more envenomed than he already was. He fell gratefully to his knees on the hard golden stone at the entrance to the box canyon and let his eyes sweep the broad blue sky.

The morning light seemed endless, the heavens vast with possibility. Runaan’s chest heaved with a rising weightlessness, and a great smile split his face.

His ears throbbed, and a pounding headache had begun behind his eyes. His shirts clung to his back, soaked with sweat, blood, and venom, the last of which had begun singing its way through his bloodstream with an acid melody. The tree spirit’s ethereal attack had also done something painful to Runaan’s chest just below his left collarbone, and it throbbed in counterpoint to his heartbeat. Breathing hurt on so many levels that he didn’t even want to count them.

_And I broke my bow!_

At that sudden, grumpy thought, Runaan suddenly burst into quiet laughter. Despite his injuries, his shoulders shook gently, then harder, until he was wheezing for breath and had to lean forward onto a hand, side tails swaying, to steady himself. _Moon and Shadow, that hurts_. _I suppose I can’t be dead, then. Not yet._

He breathed through his nose until he got the pain—and the laughter—under control. Then he settled back onto his heels. The Moonshadow village was only a short walk away, even in his state. Runaan’s stomach growled insistently as he realized that the rest of the day was his to live out. And the day after, and the day after that.

With a stifled groan and an eager smile, the journeyman assassin got to his feet, caught his breath, and headed toward the village. He had been promised breakfast, after all.


End file.
